Field of the Invention
The invention relates to corporate content such as corporate training programs and more specifically to methods and systems for disseminating corporate content and tracking the results of retail, service, or other similar training and communication programs and similar interactive corporate content.
Description of Related Art
Distributing corporate content, such as training systems, product information, and the like (e.g., for training employees on various aspects of a company's policies, products, and procedures) is an important human resource issue for large retail, restaurant, automotive, hospitality, service, and other dispersed-workforce corporations. A system must be in place to insure that employees in different stores or outlets receive the same or similar training so that the corporate identity of the company is preserved and so that the company can be certain that each location is meeting at least the minimum levels of acceptable training and receiving communication.
Previous methods of conveying such information to employees include the use of a manual and the use of speakers to large groups of employees. The former is largely ineffective for several reasons. Typically, a corporate manual is many pages long, and the employee has little interest in reading it. Further, the company has little assurance that the employee will actually read the manual. While an employee may be asked to sign a statement indicating that he or she read the manual, such a mechanism provides little assurance of an actual reading of the manual by the employee.
The latter method, providing a speaker to an assembly of employees, also has several drawbacks. While it is simple enough to take attendance at such an event, there is no guarantee that an employee will actually retain anything taught at the assembly. Further, for extremely large companies, either the company must rent out an enormous assembly area for the assembly or the speaker or speakers must perform the same program multiple times for different audiences. Neither of these methods is very efficient.
Another way companies have been training their employees is via videotaped presentations or presentations made on CD, DVD, or other media. This is a significant improvement to the above-described methods for several reasons. First, the employees can be trained in small groups or even individually at the stores themselves or in an office or conference room as opposed to a large assembly space or convention center. Because the training program is fixed in a reusable medium, the program itself need only be recorded once, and a number of copies of the training program may be distributed to each store or outlet. Further, each location can use its copy of the training program periodically, e.g., annually, or every time a new employee is hired, or the like. Finally, since each employee can be shown the training program at the convenience of the company, a contemporaneous quiz or test may be administered to the employee either during the training program or immediately or shortly thereafter. By later grading the employee's quiz or test, the company can determine how effective the training program was by seeing precisely how much material the employee absorbed. Such a method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,079 to McMenimen et al., the teachings of which are incorporated by reference herein.
Despite the advantages offered by recorded training programs, drawbacks remain in conventional systems. First, the tracking of employee test data can be laborious and difficult, particularly if a company has many hundreds or thousands of employees. It would be desirable though difficult to be able to sort test data by any number of different variables, such as by employee, by store, by training program (assuming more than one program is provided), and the like. To do so using conventional systems, test data would have to be entered into a central database in a sortable manner, quite a labor-intensive task for large companies. Also, if the tests are administered either in groups or serially to individual employees, at least some employees are likely to cheat, either by directly asking a colleague what an answer was, or by watching him take the test. Store managers can also aid and abet in cheating by giving their employees the answers to raise the overall score of their respective stores. Additionally, since many businesses are not static but dynamic in nature (i.e., changing all the time), corporate content must also be readily and easily updatable. However, once corporate content is put on a CD, DVD, or the like, a new CD, DVD, etc. must be shipped to each location. Not only is this practice wasteful and inefficient, but this may lead to certain locations not receiving the updated materials, using the wrong/outdated materials, or the like.
Certain conventional employee training systems place their training programs on a central computer that is accessible remotely. This insures that every employee is accessing the same program, however it requires a robust connection between each local computer and the server to handle the amount of data being transmitted (namely, the entire training program). If a program is mere text, this is not as much of a problem, however majority rapidly growing number of training programs incorporate full-motion video, which would require significant bandwidth over the communications link. For large companies, the server would also necessarily be very robust so as to handle numerous connections simultaneously. For dispersed-workforce companies, connectivity bandwidth at satellite locations is limited and used primarily for mission-critical data and operations such as credit card authorization, merchandise lookup, and the like. Having one or more employees streaming high bandwidth corporate content on one or more local desktops, tablets, smartphones, or similar portable electronic devices (be they company issued or otherwise) will interfere with those mission-critical operations and result in choppy or unwatchable corporate content.